The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) - DVD

by Alex Jackson I don't think that
there is any getting around the fact that any true connoisseur of trash
cinema has to see Rodney Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.
This was, after all, the feature film debut of Mackenzie Astin, a.k.a.
the horny kid from "The Facts of Life", and of Spanish soap star Katie
Barbieri. Just as the picture marked the start of a career for some, it
marked the end of a career for others. The presence of child star,
singer, and Joan Collins's bitchy ex-husband Anthony Newley is a chief
selling point in the film's trailer, but he was on his way out. And The
Garbage Pail Kids Movie was the last feature from television
director Amateau, who seems to have viewed it as his own personal Fanny
and Alexander, taking on writing and producing chores in
addition to casting other Amateaus (J.P. and Chloe) in minor roles.

Most notably (to me, at least), the special
effects and make-up were the product of John Carl Buechler, the B-movie
veteran who had directed Troll the year previous
and went on to helm Friday the 13th
Part VII: The New Blood the following year. Little-person
actor Phil Fondacaro, also a veteran of B horror movies (having starred
as the troll in Troll under Buechler's direction!),
plays the "Garbage Pail Kid" Greaser Greg. Of course, the film's
strangest credit has to be "A Topps Chewing Gum Production." Children's
entertainment in the 1980s was hardly top-of-the-line. When we weren't
getting cartoons imported from France or live-action programming
imported from Canada, we had entire television series based on action
figures--basically half-hour long commercials for Mattel that actively
blurred the line between the product and the promotion. The
Garbage Pail Kids Movie is a film in the same model: it's a
feature-length film based on a series of trading
cards, and as such it serves as handy specimen of a corporate
mindset that has nothing but contempt for the nation's youth--and
nothing but greed for their allowance money.

Nothing I have written about the film up to
this point indicates that I have actually watched The Garbage
Pail Kids Movie so much as simply investigated the credits on
the IMDb and gushed over them. The reason I've done this, of course, is
that the actual content of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
is utterly irrelevant when measured against the very novelty of its
existence. Astin, Barbieri, Newley, and Fondacaro needn't do anything
interesting in the film, they simply have to grace us with their
presence. A movie about the Garbage Pail Kids needn't do anything
interesting with them, as long as it actually contains Garbage Pail
Kids and uses the title The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.
In line with its collector's-item roots, The Garbage Pail
Kids Movie is a true fetish object. While its value is
probably significantly reduced now that it has gone from out-of-print
VHS title to widely-available DVD, one could still safely say that it's
infinitely more fun to own it than it is to watch it.

Dodger (Astin) is in love with Tangerine
(Barbieri), but she thinks he is a total geek! What's more, Tangerine
is going with Juice (Ron MacLachlan), who is prone to insane bouts of
jealousy and freely beats up and humiliates Dodger for the slightest
infraction. One afternoon, Dodger spots Tangerine window-shopping at
the antique shop where he works. He invites her in and is trying to
sell her some knick-knacks in an attempt to get her to stay when Juice
spots the two of them. In the resulting battle, Juice knocks over a
magic garbage pail that is to never be opened. And so are released the
Garbage Pail Kids: mutant children each with a unique disgusting habit.
Messy Tessie has a constantly running nose, Ali Gator is an alligator
that eats toes, Foul Phil is a baby with really bad breath, Windy
Winston farts, Valerie Vomit vomits, Nat Nerd wets himself, and Greaser
Greg is a '50s greaser. The kids decide to help Dodger win Tangerine if
he will agree to help them find their friends at the State Home for the
Ugly.

I must say there is a lot in this movie that
is bad in a fruitful way. Juice is roughly fifteen years older than
Dodger and in his first scene hangs him up by his feet and steals the
money out of his wallet. Juice seems to need a lot of money. He takes
all of Tangerine's earnings from selling clothes and later captures and
turns in the Garbage Pail Kids to the State Home for the Ugly for
bounty. The '80s-centric music, clothes, and hairstyles have a
sincerity that makes them ripe for derision, especially the clothes,
since they're integral to the plot (Tangerine sells them, and the
Garbage Pail Kids manufacture them to help Dodger impress her) and the
characters therefore have to regard them as cool and stylish. The
highlight of the picture is easily a musical number that appears
halfway through and genuinely shocks for its sheer needlessness. The
film does exhibit some wit, though. Just a little bit. If you look
quick, you'll see that the guy in the State Home for the Ugly labelled
"Too Short" is Toulouse-Lautrec.

But there is also a whole lot in the film
that is bad in a just-bad way. Despite their innately archetypal
nature, the Garbage Pail Kids don't have distinguishable personalities,
and Amateau derives very little humour from them. A scene in a movie
theatre is an utter waste of celluloid, lacking in the most basic
internal logic: the Garbage Pail Kids torment the other moviegoers, who
never seem to really react. Do they understand that the Garbage Pail
Kids are not human? If so, then why aren't they alarmed? Most of the
jokes are just plain lame. The guy in the State Home for the Ugly
labelled "Too Fat" is Santa Claus. After ugly-people catchers from the
State Home for the Ugly catch a little girl, she reveals that she was
wearing a mask. The catchers tell her that she should only wear masks
on Halloween. In addition to this more innocent brand of stupidity,
there is the usual lot of fart jokes, booger jokes, pee jokes, et
cetera. (I mean, this isThe Garbage Pail
Kids Movie.) Gross-out humour can work well if used right, of
course. The original card series, designed to
parody the sickly sweet and insanely popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls,
had an angry, nasty charge. They were iconoclastic for the sake of
being iconoclastic--like the current work of Trey Parker and Matt
Stone, they had no real political consciousness and would break down
aesthetic and moral institutions without rebuilding new ones. Ah, but
they worked pretty well for what they were. It was a big fuck-you to
the Cabbage Patch Kids and everything they represented. Punk rock for
kiddies.

The film of course neutralizes much of what
made the trading cards so daring and (un)attractive. An obsession with
death and body mutilation has been simplified into an obsession with
farts and pee, and despite frequent references to cannibalism in the
series, the only people-eater that surfaces on-screen is an alligator.
Even more problematic, the filmmakers half-heartedly try to lay on a
message about true ugliness being on the inside. I suppose they felt a
responsibility to make the film at least somewhat nourishing, but
they've wound up losing their cake and not getting to eat it. The
Garbage Pail Kids must, on some level, be regarded as rebels, and to do
this they must also be moderately ugly on the inside--thus compromising
the supposed message of the picture. But the very presence of the "true
ugliness is on the inside" moral keeps the filmmakers from having the
Kids ever doing anything truly despicable, preventing them from
fulfilling their intended purpose. Anybody who really believes that
ugliness is on the inside will still consider the insides of these kids
pretty unappealing, while anybody who likes the Garbage Pail Kids for
their repulsiveness is sure to find this movie version pretty soggy.

At the end of the picture, Tangerine, having
betrayed the Garbage Pail Kids and exploited Dodger, comes crawling on
her hands and knees back to him asking for forgiveness. He refutes her,
saying, "I don't think you're pretty anymore." This somehow feels a
little cruel, considering that we see that Tangerine is caught in a
very abusive relationship and is trying to earn enough money to leave
town (and probably Juice) to pursue her dreams. That she puts this
above Dodger's feelings is hardly excusable, but it's understandable.
There is a modicum of complexity here. Given the weakness of the film's
supposed moral, I'm not convinced that Dodger is refuting Tangerine
simply because she has a black heart.

Usually with a plot like this, the hero
learns that the unobtainable woman was never worth obtaining and will
end up with the nice obtainable woman he now realizes is really great.
There is no nice obtainable woman in The Garbage Pail Kids
Movie; Dodger's happy ending is celibacy. I think, then, that
the real reason Dodger refutes Tangerine is because he has learned that
sexual desire, all sexual desire, leads to nothing but trouble. This
explains, I think, why he pulls away into the shadows in terror when he
sees Tangerine remove her shirt. It also explains what, exactly, the
Garbage Pail Kids are rebelling against when they redirect a sewage
pipe into the drain of a bathing couple's hot tub. It seems that Juice,
Tangerine, and their circle of friends are not hated merely because
they're mean, but because their tank tops and Jersey hair represent an
evil sexual charge, too. After all, the film doesn't offer any model
for a positive form of sexuality. (Admittedly, this
doesn't explain why Amateau has Messy Tessie and Greaser Greg play
doctor off-screen. I can only offer that I wish there were more scenes
like that--and given that Messy Tessie refutes him, perhaps it's
Greaser Greg's sexual desires and not his rude way of going about them
that is his real "dirty habit.")

In the aftermath of the recent "Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas" debacle, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
serves as a reminder of how deep our fear of any hint of sexuality in
even the most subversive of children's entertainment really goes. It's
like the final frontier, the one thing that is totally off-limits for
children to think about or orient themselves with in any regard. (There
is, notably, no sexual content in the card series, either.) The hidden
message of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is that
boogers and urine may be gross, but sex goes beyond gross: it's evil.
Whatever else you kids do, all is easily forgiven as long as you have
your cherry intact. Only in America, folks.

THE
DVD
The image quality of MGM's bare-bones DVD release of The
Garbage Pail Kids is actually pretty good, better than I
would want to give it credit for. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen
transfer is most comfortable with deep colours, and the black
backgrounds and blue skies have a great vibrant clarity. The stuff
in-between, however, is rather undistinguished. The Dolby 2.0 mono
track is clear but utterly lacking in any oomph, unfortunately dating
the picture instantly. One glance at the condition of the film's
trailer (the disc's only extra), however, confirms that the
presentation could've looked and sounded much worse.

Now if they'd just put The Gong
Show Movie on DVD. Originally published: July 25, 2005.